Figure 3

Infectivity of WT and mutant gp41 HIV-1 _NL4.3 strains. A. At day 0, CD4⁺ T-lymphocyte C8166 cells were infected with comparable viral loads, based on equal amounts of the p24 capsid protein. For 7 consecutive days, samples were harvested, fixed and analysed for eGFP expression by flow cytometry. B. The infectivity as presented in panel A was quantified using a linear regression to part of the curves, starting at day 1 post infection to the peak of the infectivity curve. Data are the means ± SEM of at least 5 independent experiments. The difference between WT and mutant virus was considered to be significant when the p value calculated using the student’s t-test was <0.05 (* = p < 0.05, ** = p < 0.005).